Sword at Sunset Arthurian novel by Rosemary Sutcliff an ‘odd one out’ | The Independent newspaper in Dec 2012

Historian, writer and journalist Christina Hardyment reflected on Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff in response to the anniversary edition of Sutcliff’s Arthurian adult novel – an ‘odd one out’.

Rosemary Sutcliff is most famed for The Eagle of the Ninth, but there was much more to her than that. In the 1950s, historically-minded children found her books a magic carpet into the past. I began with Brother Dusty-feet (1952) and The Armourer’s House(1951), and never looked back an insatiable interest in history has remained the backbone of my life.

In 1954, The Eagle of the Ninth introduced Marcus Flavius Aquila, a young Roman who chooses to stay in Britain after the legions leave. Seven subsequent books follow his family’s fate, usually directly. The odd book out is the fifth, Sword at Sunset, now published in a new edition to celebrate its 50th birthday. In 1963, it was firmly announced to be for adults, and given the (for their time) graphic and violent scenes of sex and slaughter, it deserved to be.

It is also unusual among Sutcliff’s books in that it is told in the first person. Artorius, devoted nephew of the High King Ambrosius, has a bit part in the fourth Aquila book, The Lantern Bearers, but now takes centre stage. He recalls on his death bed how he was charged by the ageing Ambrosius with leading a crack fighting force known as the Companions against invaders from Saxony, Jutland and Norway.

In time, he becomes the High King of Britain, even Caesar Britannicus, but his doom has threatened ever since he was drugged and seduced by his half-sister Ygerna and begat Medraut, a boy filled with hate by his mother. Memories of this bedevil his marriage to Guenhumara, and she and the Gallic harpist and warrior Bedwyr (rather than Lancelot) grow perilously close.

When Sutcliff first began to consider how Arthur would fit in to her saga of Aquila, she drew as much upon the archaeology of Celtic and Saxon Britain as on the ancient legends in Malory’s Morte Darthur and Guest’s Mabinogion. She also admired TH White’s four idiosyncratic Arthurian novels (now known as The Once and Future King), and the intensity with which she inhabits the mind of her hero Artos has echoes of White’s extraordinary characterisation of Arthur. “I have never written a book that was so possessive,” Sutcliff said in an interview in 1986. “It was almost like having the story fed through me”. Writing as a man possessed her; afterwards, “I had great difficulty getting back into a woman’s skin.”

Her narrative amazes in the sheer vigour of its visualisation and its sure sense of purpose. Lanterns, sunsets, fires, the aurora borealis and other manifestations of light recur: Artos is holding back the coming of the dark long enough for there to be hope that the civilised light that was Rome will survive to be adopted by its conquerors. Battles are heart-stopping, tense and unpredictable, winter weather effects are frostbite-inducing, and Artos’s travels across Britain are confidently mapped (the glossary of Roman names will be needed).

No-one would dream from reading Sword at Sunset and Sutcliff’s other action-packed, fast-moving tales of Roman and Celtic warriors that she remained severely crippled all her life with the juvenile arthritis she contracted as a very small child. Once one is aware of this, a recurring theme of incapacitating wounds is better understood; as is the important role she gives to the hounds and horses in which she found such consolation.

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I had great difficulty reading ‘sword at sunset‘ because it is so intenSe. You See, I have always disliked Arthur in every Arthurian novel. Go ‘the once and future king‘ I liked the Orkney-brothers and in most others I side with Lancelot. But Rosemary Sutcliff wouldn’t let me do that writing from Arthur’s pov. I found myself drawn to understand him more and more and I resented that and never attempted to read it a second time, but highly recommended it to others ;)

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past posts

the guardian newspaper in praise of rosemary sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – "a place where two worlds met without mingling" as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel's central character, is posted.

Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of "other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling". This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.

The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff's unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff's finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.